Then she was on top of me, with the scented tangle of her hair hanging around us, holding my face cupped between both hands as she kissed me hard and deep.
“Emmy Harlow,” she whispered against my lips. “I want to do everything to you.”
Then her mouth was a blaze down my neck and breasts, teasing out a moan low in my throat when she drew each nipple into her mouth. She trailed a scalding path over my belly, tracing circles around my hips with her tongue and lips, biting down on the thin, sensitive skin pinned taut over the bone. I twitched helplessly against her, caught by the tidal undertow of sensation, until it was all I could do not to outright beg her for more.
“Say it to me, Emmy,” she demanded between kisses, husky and low, as if she knew just how wild she was driving me. “Ask for it.”
“Please,” I said, when I thought maybe I’d implode from the gravity of all that pulsing want. “Talia, just . . . please.”
Then her mouth was between my legs, parting me down the center; her hair sliding against my thighs, and everything inside me surging up to meet her.
I arched my back like a bow, not even caring how I sounded, stars swirling against the darkness behind my closed eyes. I said her name so many times that I lost count.
Talia, Talia, please, Talia.
Then it began to rain outside, just like I’d known it would.
It fell first in a soft, pervasive shush, cattails rustling against one another in high wind; then a loud, cascading downpour, rattling like marbles onto the roof above our heads. The room filled with the smell of rain and gusting cold, but the two of us were such an inferno that the creeping chill felt like a balm. We were pure heat together, a building blaze with no known boundaries. A tangled locus of lips and hands, driving each other wild over and over again.
A fire that felt like madness, like it might never be put out.
24
What You Do Best
I just remembered,” I said, trailing my fingers idly down Talia’s back. She lay pillowed on my chest, my chin tucked against her crown, her head rising and falling with each of my breaths. “You never told me why you don’t have any tattoos.”
“Seriously, Emmy?” Her laugh feathered over my chest. “That’s what you want to talk about right now?”
“Just humor me.” It was so nice to keep hearing my name from her, even now that we weren’t caught up in the moment. It felt like gaining ground, like I’d won something precious that was finally mine to keep. “I have a feeling it’s something I’d want to know.”
She sighed, pouting against my skin, drawing runelike patterns into my lower belly. “But you’re going to make fun of me.”
“After you made me come, what, sixty-five thousand times? I could never. It’s like you fucked the sass right out of me.”
“When you put it that way . . .” She laughed a little, and then I heard her swallow in the dark. “Okay, I guess it is only fair. The thing is, I want to wait for matching tattoos. You know, with a partner. So we can have . . . something indelible, something that matters in a special way. Something that I’d never done on my own before.”
“Let me get this straight,” I said, biting down on the inside of my cheek to keep a straight face. “You want to be an ink virgin, because you’re saving yourself for your first time with that extra special someone?”
“Oh, fuck you,” she said, struggling against me as if to get up. I held her tight, locked against me until she lapsed back onto my chest, laughing despite herself.
“Wait a minute, now I’m processing the implications. Does this make me an ink slut? Dermally promiscuous?”
“You promised you wouldn’t make fun!”
“That was before I knew you were such a closet romantic,” I teased, tugging her up until we were nose to nose, her head nested on the pillow next to mine. “Now all bets are off.”
“It’s not like I go to such great lengths to hide it,” she said, and I sensed from the wary shift in her tone that we’d somehow wandered back into serious territory. “Is that a problem for you?”
“Of course it’s not,” I said, nuzzling her nose. “Why would it ever be?”
“Because it has been before.”
I drew back a little, enough to see the liquid glimmer of her eyes in the dark. “What do you mean?” I said, more carefully. “And I’m really not teasing now, I swear. I just want to know—if you want to tell me.”
She hesitated, tucking a hand under her cheek like a little girl. “I really don’t want to fuck this up by talking about exes.”